Effective network communications is becoming increasingly important in today's society. One aspect of network communications relates to the ability to gather or to monitor information that is contained within a communication flow. Devices, components, and equipment within a network may wish to glean information from the communication flow in order to provide some capability or enhancement to entities within a network or to accommodate or account for an end user in some fashion.
In monitoring or gleaning information from a communication flow, a piece of network equipment needs to be bluntly inserted into a communications line such that the communication flow passes through the inserted piece of network equipment. This network configuration suffers from a number of drawbacks. For example, pieces of network equipment that are inserted into the line slow overall network communications because the communication flow needs to be received and then retransmitted at each piece of equipment in the communication flow. In addition, some of the inserted network devices may wish to process the information within the communication flow before communicating the data to a next destination which also slows network communications. The processing of the information may affect the communications format presenting compatibility or encryption/decryption problems for devices and equipment positioned downstream of the processing equipment. Moreover, the inserted piece of network equipment may only need a small amount of information from the communication flow.
Yet another problem associated with this configuration relates to the issue of priority. Essentially, each owner or lessor of the inserted device, component, or equipment would generally desire to be positioned first in priority for receiving the communication flow. Accordingly, a hierarchy must be established and maintained, presenting additional constraints and management problems for the network. Yet another drawback to this system is that this network configuration is inhibited by failover characteristics because a malfunction or a breakdown in one device or component may result in a truncation of the communication flow such that devices downstream are unable to receive data from the communication flow.